DELONEY AND OTHERS 171

and other wi iters nearer our own time, he profited by these circum-
stances when he became an author. Greene and Dekker could
hardly be accepted as infallible witnesses on the social conditions
about which they were so fluent. Deloney wrote from intimate
acquaintance > he knew the people whom he portrayed, he had
shared their lot, and was, in fact, writing for them to read. Hence
his transparent truth and raciness, and the charm of unsophisticated
ease and simplicity.

About the man few facts are extant. He is supposed to have been
a native of Norwich, but the date of his birth can only be con-
jectured. His name suggests a French origin, and his family may
have come over with the Flemish and Walloon refugees who settled
in Norfolk in the fourteenth centuiy, or with the Huguenots who
arrived in the sixteenth.1 Both these immigrations helped to
strengthen the position of Norfolk as a centre of the textile industry.
Deloney was a silk-weaver ; this craft was largely in the hands of
foreign operatives. Strype mentions a book of his written for the
silk-weavers, containing " foolish and disorderly matter" ; but
whether this was another story-book is unknown, as the work has
vanished. From his wide and accurate knowledge of towns and
villages and of the roads of England it may be gathered that he led
an unsettled life down to the period, about 1596, when he is found
living in Cnpplegate, earning a precarious livelihood by his ballads,
and then by his prose tales of the clothing and shoemaking industries.
He had succeeded Elderton as the laureate of the working classes.

1596 was the year of the great dearth, which came as a terrible
aggravation of the ills from which his fellow-workmen were suffer-
ing, through a complicated series of checks and disturbances in the
textile trade. It was desirable that public attention should be called
to the effects of the legal restraints which were hampering the in-
dustry, as Deloney does, in Jack of Newbery, in a cautious and
roundabout way.2 It was also eminently desirable that the nation

1 Op. czf.,, pp. 33-37, on Deloney's piobabe French ancestry; and passtm on
the effect of the influx of foieigners on the weaving industry.

2 The economic questions underlying Deloney's three works of fiction are
admirably set forth by M. Abel Chevalley, in his Thomas Deloney: le roman
des metiers au temps de Skahspeare (Paris, 1916). The Tudor period was a
critical time in the evolution of industry The mediaeval guild system was
obsolescent, and the guilds themselves, bolstered up by royal charters, were
degenerating into close corporations that stiove by every device to keep down